Fluttering Butterflies

Gee.  The past few weeks have been the longest I've ever gone without reviewing anything since my blog started over a decade ago.  But I got the pre-Thanksgiving home renovations that needed finishing finished (mostly), got the house clean (mostly) and had a lovely time with my dear extended family!  And now I'm back, easing myself in gently with a picture book review... The Trouble with Time Travel, by Stephen W. Martin, illustrated by Cornelia Li (Owlkids, October 15, 2019), is a charming (though stressful) story of Max and her dog Boomer, and a too-enthusiastically thrown Frisbee that shatters a family heirloom, the one thing saved from the mysterious sinking of her many-times great-grandmother's houseboat.  Max decides that the only thing to do about the shattered vase is to build a time machine, and go back in time to smash the vase before it ended up in her living room. Happily, building a time machine is but the work of minutes (a nice bit of girl engineering ...

Sleeping Bear Press kindly sent a package of review copies of their picture books of 2018 for distribution at Kidlitcon 2019 last month, but sadly the package ended up in the shrubbery next to the door I don't use, so I didn't see them until after the fact.  I've mailed them off to folks who follow the Kidlitcon twitter account, but also wanted to spotlight them here by way of a thank you and an apology to Sleeping Bear for not checking the shrubberies…. The Hanukkah Hamster , by Michelle Markel, illustrated by Andre Ceolin It's December in the city, and Edgar, a young cab driver, is busy taking holiday shoppers to and fro.  One evening he finds a little hamster in the back of the cab, and is charmed.  Little Chickpea becomes his friend, and is company each night Edgar when lights the candles on the menorah, thinking of his home back in Israel.  But Edgar did the right think, and reported the hamster to lost and found--will his new friend be claimed by its rightful o...

Here's a fun picture book for Timeslip Tuesday (which is code for "yet another week in which Charlotte wasn't organized enough to read a longer book in a timely fashion"). I have to confess I have never read Dragons Love Tacos, by Adam Rubin, illustrated Daniel Salmieri.  I feel, however, that I grasped the point, and the sequel ( Dragons Love Tacos 2 ) gracefully fills in what happened in the first book. In this sequel, dragons still love tacos, but there are no more tacos to be had!  They are all gone.  The unnamed human protagonist fortunately has a time machine, and he takes a few of the dragons back to when there still were tacos, so they can bring them back and plant them and restore tacos to the grieving world.  Time-travel with taco-eating dragons is tricky; spicy tacos make Dragons flame, which is bad for the time machine, as is accidently using salsa in place of engine grease...so things get a little wonky, and the pure time travel of the first few hops in ...